JOHNNY: How long would the Fontana covers take to produce?

JH: One of those? Four days I suppose.

JOHNNY: Did you do them all in bulk, or did they come in bits and pieces?

JH: They tell you you’ve got so many they want you to do, then they feed them into you with a synopsis. Then you deliver one, pick one up. Deliver one, pick one up. They would send you synopsis of all these stories and I would paint loosely around them.

JOHNNY: Okay – let’s move onto the H P Lovecraft books that were published by Berkley Ballantine in America. How did you land the contract for those?

JH: Well my friend who was Art Director at Granada was head-hunted by Ian Ballantine to come and work for Ballantine books in New York. He said do you want to do some Lovecraft, and I said why not. Actually those may have been the very first horror covers I ever did. You see Dave would have taken a chance on me, I was a new illustrator, I had only just started and no-one really knew what I was doing or was capable of and he gave me these ten to do, which I did and I think that they look really good and are not your typical Lovecraft images which everyone expects.

JOHNNY: After they were completed did you notice a marked rise in your workload?

JH: For horror, yes and by that token also a lot of Astrology covers. I also painted drama and detective books. But funnily enough, I also supplied covers for many female liberation writers apart from Germaine.

JOHNNY: The main draw to your work with the Fontana Horrors, the Lovecraft books and also several other horror anthologies is the way you paint and modify the face over and over again – and managing to produce something horrific each time. What is it about the face as a concept that makes you want to subject it to the most extreme forms of torture?

JH: Faces are wonderful aren’t they? They’re wonderful. You know, you sit outside of a cafe and you watch people walk by. You know, we’ve all got the same equipment, but my God everyone is so different. How can we recognise someone you know? What is it about someone we recognise? Everyone has got two eyes, a nose and a mouth. I think faces are wonderful; I just like to destroy them.

JOHNNY: You’ve done a lot of dripping, melting faces in many of your paintings with some images defying explanation as to how you could possibly come up with them – have these paintings been a product of experimenting with drugs of a hallucinogenic nature?

JH: No, not at all. I’ve always toed a straight line. It’s just all come from in here (taps head). I’ve never bought any, never smoked any – it’s just what comes out when I turn on the tap. And I don’t know what it is about me painting faces on walls. I’ve done a few of those haven’t I? (Laughs)

JOHNNY: Can you take me though the process on how you would start a painting back then?

JH: When I started I had no money at all, I had a wife and two kids; we were very, very poor. I just used to get a sheet of paper and I invented my own technique, which was pieces of white paper and some wax crayons, you know marking crayons that you’d mark on parcels with but you were limited because they only had orange, red, blue black and white – that’s all you had. I used to rub these down - I used to start off with a coating of orange, then red, then black and then I would cut away like a scraper board and then I found that you could polish it, and then I found you could granate it. I then discovered Gesso board and those small coloured crayons that came in every colour and the Gesso coated board was even better because I could cut back into the flesh with wire wool or a razor blade to make highlights.

JOHNNY: Is it a technique that you still use?

JH: No, not now. I just use oil and acrylics. Not watercolours because I tend to worry things to death, I can’t just put something down and leave it like you have to do with watercolour.

JOHNNY: What preparations would you do before undertaking a project?

JH: I would do two or three small draft paintings, just rough works – sometimes I would just talk about the painting over the phone and then do it. And I think, as far as I can remember – the Fontana ones I just brought in and gave to them, no prep work done for them at all.

JOHNNY: What’s been the toughest project you’ve ever had to do?

JH: Oh, I can tell you that easy. There was this bloke in Cambridge who wanted me to do a surreal Grand Prix race. It had to have this in it, it had to have that in it, it had to have, it had to have a jeep in it, it had to have Michelin in it. Any way I had over Easter to do it. The rough was approved, I worked all over Easter while my friends and family were all outside having fun and I took it in on the Monday and he took one look at it and said that it’s not right, I don’t want it and that was that. He didn’t want it.

JOHNNY: So you never sold it to him. Did you punch him?

JH: I think I left it with him, I was so disgusted. It was so out of my usual realm in any case – this bloody Grand Prix thing.

JOHNNY: What’s been your most profitable commission?

JH: It’s been The Female Eunuch, because I keep on selling secondary rights all the time. Once, twice a year you know. Magazines, reprints of the book, newspaper articles and stuff like that. You get whatever they’re paid to pay. Some places are different. In Australia you get a few more quid, Italy and France not so much while Germany is very, very fair. So correct with their business. No-one’s really gotten in touch with me to ask for secondary rights to my horror stuff because I don’t want them to. I don’t make a deal out of it, I just have no interest in it anymore.

JOHNNY: Did you ever give paintings to publishing houses only for them to disappear and you never got them back or saw them again?

JH: You know what, I say about 60 – 70% of all my stuff I’ve never gotten back. I was just busy, just too busy to chase them up. I’ve lost some wonderful stuff.

JOHNNY: In the late 80’s, early 90’s did you notice a decline in the commissions you were receiving to do books? Many other artists I’ve spoken to have said it was pretty rife.

JH: No, I got sick in the late 80’s. I was taking my wife to a faith healer (laughs) and I was in this garden with my granddaughter and I jumped off of this tiny bloody rock about eight inches high and broke my bleeding ankle. So the faith healer went like this and put his hands around my ankle and said can you feel that – and I said yes, it hurts like hell – and I spent a lot of time doing nothing because of this bloody ankle and I went into a deep, deep depression. And then after that I had a couple of strokes I had things coming down in front of my eyes, like bats, and then cancer. I didn’t, couldn’t do any painting at this time.

JOHNNY: So when did you come out of the other side?

JH: Well...I haven’t come out the other side. It’s called intransient...clinical. But it’s controlled by tablets and I’ve got a tape, like a mantra tape and that helps enormously. But I started painting again about five years ago. But after my heart failure I can’t hold my hands up for very long. I do about five minutes and then I have to stop, it takes a long while now.

JOHNNY: Have people tried to get in touch with you to do book covers now?

JH: No not now, I wouldn’t accept them, it just wouldn’t be fair on them. I just paint for myself.

JOHNNY: What do you think about the fact that your work is extremely well regarded and feted amongst weird pulp horror fans like myself?

JH: (Laughs) Well, I for one am very grateful! I just do what Picasso said – ‘Just copy everyone you can except yourself, so you know that’s what you try to do – something new all the time. A new take on old bits of experience – then put your bits of experience on it and then you present it and that’s art. You improvise, you invent.